2nd
I have a weird relationship to art, I try but often I don’t ‘get’ art, and I haven’t done a lot of it, but most of my attempts at reading about art have been bad experiences. The Honourable Sir God Knight in Shining Armour Knausguaard has done it with a whole book on Evard Munch and even he could not convince me. If you’re going to tell me about the painting, well I might as well look at the damn thing myself. The best book about painting that I’ve read was The success and failure of Picasso from John Berger, and I believe that was so because the interpretation of the art was not too abstract and a lot of the book was actually about the painter and his circumstances. I go to museums, but I’m not a museum person. Most of the time I’ve gone because it’s simply on the tourist’s checklist. The most memorable museum visits have been to the Tate museum in London. This one is far less frequented than the Tate Modern, and that seems to me precisely why I liked it, as an escape from the madness of London since it was sparsely occupied and quiet. I seem to recall quite a good audio tour, if not an actual tour guide, because refer to my first sentence, I don’t get it and hence need to be told about it, but then refer to the sentence a little after, where I want to look and interpret it myself. Weird, illogical, I know. The other one was here in the Netherlands, the Museum Voorlinden. The spacious building made for an excellent experience, and since it’s a modern art museum, I could enjoy the pieces without any historical context, which at times can bore me. We had a museum card here in the Netherlands. It was something to do, I don’t feel any regret in having gone, but other people probably get a better experience out of it than me.
Well, what about literature, this is art too? There’s probably only a small part of me that appreciates good writing, in fact what I like about literature is that it feels like ammunition against the class struggle, which I’m so impassioned with (impassioned with or maybe bitter cause I’m not driving a Seven Series Beemer). John Berger talking in the context of art: “Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?” Well, for me this comes from books. Contrary to Berger, my experience to painting, sculpture, galleries tends to exhibit classism, that is, mostly it is created and consumed by the elites.
This month promises to be interesting. Since you know me a little by now and have read my book reviews, I’ll very much turn my interpretation of art into some attack against the bourgeoisie, though I’ll try to keep my hammer and sickle locked up in the basement, and truly try to feel some art.
4th
How are my school trips supposed to hold a candle to yours? You talk of Paris and Rome, Amsterdam, all I can offer is something like Oakville Ontario. Suburban sprawl and a veritable desert when it comes to art. The high watermark of art in my days came from Ikea, the black and white imprint of Audrey Hephburn, the one that you could find adorned on numerous walls of the suburbs, and if you saw it, you’d immediately pull up your sweat pants and tuck in your Tom Brady Patriots jersey, because you were among the high society now. No, there was no beauty, there is no beauty, or perhaps there is , but it’s all horded by the creme de la creme, behind closed walls, as there is not one public piece of art that I can recall. Generally, the parks there are nothing but vast expanses of grass, to erect something like a sculpture or thought provoking installation costs money, public money, and it is an unwritten rule that the public vermin should have nothing of the sort. In the latest park they built by my parents, across the street from the Walmart, I should indicate, they placed a war memorial. This is a reminder of the sacrifice the Canadian armed forces made, and that you should be happy with this vast empty field of grass, we fought for freedom for fucks sakes. Freedom to slave at jobs and shop at Wal-mart, while the war-profiteers built up mansions and castles by the lake, and behind their fences, there, that’s where you’ll find the war booty and fine árt (meaningless accent added for more effect).
Sorry, you touched a nerve there.
We didn’t have your fancy coffees, I would not know what an espresso would be until my late twenties and pronounced it EXpresso until my thirties, the only Michalangelo we would have known would been the Ninja Turtle, and the closest thing to Italian cuisine that we would have been exposed to would been a can of ravioli from Chef Boyardee, and even then when someone served it to you, you’d think who the fuck does this guy think he is? Fancy prick.
But we had Madam Beam. We were only thirteen at the time, and it was one of the moments that we all bonded when we all expressed our infatuation with her. She was our French teacher, and the reason why we all joined the volleyball team since she was the coach. Along with another teacher, she’d be taking us on our first trip ‘abroad’, or at least to the neighboring French speaking province of Quebec, and there wasn’t a single one of us boys who didn’t go back home to demand under the threat of violence the funds from our parents to make that trip.
Quebec is known as the closest thing to Europe that Canada offers, and if you take a look at the old part of Quebec City you’ll see why (along with more favorable social policies, and I’m willing to bet their suburbs have got some cool sculptures), but I can hardly remember the details of the trip. We were all quite young, girls were okay but nothing in comparison to Madam Beam, and I remember having the time of my life. Since we were a Catholic elementary school, we visited a church, I want to say it was the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, though I can’t be one hundred percent certain. I’m fairly confident that we didn’t go to a museum or look at any art, and at least at that age, it didn’t bother me at all, which makes me question where the art rage I feel now comes from.
5th
To close my thread, a comment that I heard during my run today on the Conversations with Tyler Podcast, to prove to you taht I’m not some deranged lunatic harping on about the suburbs. I felt rather vindicated when I heard:
“After WWII most of the western world stopped building beautiful neighborhoods. There are plenty of beautiful individual buildings, artworks, music, whatever, but actually complete neighborhoods as a whole, they’re now basically boring and mediocre, even if they’re very pleasant to live in.”
Just kidding, I’m not even close to done.
Yesterday I went to see Wes Anderson’s new movie, Asteroid City. I thought I’d pass it off as art and take a stab at reviewing it here, but with its deadpan delivery I was so incredibly bored that I took the easy way out and went to sleep. I woke up with thirty minutes left and contemplated getting up and leaving, even if I was with two friends and that would have been weird. Of course I had heard of Anderson but I’ve never taken the time to watch his films. Quirky, I believe, is the selling point. Asteroid City features a star studded cast with the Hollywood A list, already a massive red flag. At some point some aliens land, and there is some kind of plot where the actors are in a play and then they go out of character to go into the movie and fuck I don’t know either.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some art house hipster, I’m a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio (plus he’s on a mission to save the climate crisis. lol) and Daniel Day Lewis, but this is the epitome of Hollywood dollars and Hollywood starlets making art for the masses.
I promise there’s some good art to come, and hopefully some beautiful words about that art, but for now let me get this out of my system. Asteroid City is precisely the kind of movie a suburbanite would get hyped up about, Tom Hanks & Scarlett! – and I wonder if they could already be clinically dead out of boredom that they wouldn’t even register the massive pile of shit that this movie was.
6th
Today, my bread and butter; two book reviews on GR.
10th
Back in 2016 I purchased a second hand Fujifilm X70 from Marktplaats (this was before I got scammed 200 euros buying a running watch on Marktplaats – word of warning, don’t pay for items with a tikkie, and if you make that fatal error, don’t bother going to file a police report because due to privacy laws they can’t simply identify who the bank account belongs to, which seems to me the easiest way to solve a crime but ok I’m an idiot). ‘Tinkered’ is the best way to describe what I’ve done with photography, and even that might be too generous of a word. In 2004 I was gifted my first digital camera, an Olympus that accompanied me on my first solo trip in Europe, which I still have to this day, and since that was way before the advent of smartphone cameras, I put it to good use for several years. Some time in the early ten’s, I was gifted an upgrade with a Canon SLR, I can’t tell you the model, a rather basic one that I enjoyed for a couple of years, even going so far as to buy a 50 mm lens. At that time there were still two camera stores in the Utrecht city centre, and I remember the cashier reluctantly selling it to me and uttering that it was terribly underpriced for what it does, which is take great portrait shots, and the main reason why I bought it: bokeh. But that was the extent of my lens expenditures, a very modest amount, and eventually the novelty wore off with the final nail in the coffin being my first smartphone purchase around 2014. But apparently I wasn’t quite yet sated, I’m trying to think hard why I would want to fork over close to five hundred euros a couple of years later for what a good smartphone could do. I suppose back then even the most high end smartphones could not compare to what a mid-price handheld digital camera could produce, and if memory serves me correctly I wanted to spend less time on my phone, however, ironically I do remember looking at several instagram posts hashtaged fujifilmx70, and it is perhaps that which was what won me over. An inordinate amount of those came from Japan, and their understated simplicity seemed to me to convey a peace, not only in the shots themselves, but an idea of the person behind the camera, who was most likely affluent and had the opportunity own the camera, learn it, live in an expensive place like Tokyo and edit photos. Thus empirical evidence of the mimetic theory of desire. I won’t get into it, but 2016 was also a year of transition at adidas, and the boss I admired moved on, thus beginning a long drawn out process of my demise. So that had something to do with it, but even looking now, I think you’ll agree there’s a pleasing aesthetic quality to the photos. Also at that time in my life I had sufficient time to learn how to shoot manually. This is preaching to the choir, but I figured out the basics of ISO, shutter speed and aperture. I didn’t get as far as downloading any editing software, perhaps that’s a project for the future – pardon the ignorance but I wonder if the touch up and filters offered by google photos achieves the same affect. Fast forward seven years and for the latter four I had hardly used the x70 since I was provided with the latest Iphone from my corporate sugar daddy, and I liked those photos quite a lot too. Since he’s gone and the lens on my Samsung smartphone is damaged, the x70 has made a comeback, however, I am embarrassed to admit that nine times out of ten I am slapping it into auto mode.
Nevertheless, I’m leaving you with my favourite shot that I made with the x70 in February 2017. I always think back to it, although it is a photo of the stupidest thing you could think to photograph; a ramp to an underground garage. That it was taken in Milan on a weekend away to watch football at San Siro (thanks again sugar daddy, if you’re reading this, I miss you) could also factor into why it pleases me. There is something graceful in the coil of the ramp, I won’t go so far as to say something preposterous as it mimics the fibonacci sequence, though using that in a piece of writing is attractive, even if I only have a vague notion of what it could mean. The camera has done a good job in capturing the details of the iron bars on the far right, then descending down the ramp there is a darkness coming from the night but already the eye is drawn to the light adjacent and the end point of the journey. I should like to drive a Fiat down into the centre following a night of Milanese revelry, but as it stands I can only occasionally enjoy the photo, which is to say, I’m pleased with the x70 and the memories it has made for me.
11th
Two neat bullets to the brain, clean with no mess, the silencer working admirably making a sound only audible to yourself, and for a fraction of a second to the victim, your largest political opponent. The body has been liquidated off the coast, the CIA agent sitting at the corner cafe in Botafogo tapping his sunglasses twice upon seeing cross the avenue you to indicate that it has all gone according to plan and later that evening you can expect the second half of the payment to be delivered to you at the hotel. Vanilla and coconuts, before looking behind your shoulder her aroma fills your nostrils. Steak, tomahawk, medium rare perfection, comes with a hand written word of appreciation from the gauchos. In the distance the yacht approaches the harbor and you barely make out the champagne on ice. Older, but still in the prime of life. She uncorks another bottle of Chilean red, and it is then that you take out your pack of Hollywood cigarettes. Stoneflower in the background, the sun setting, a moment of sad contemplation of what’s to come for the people, the smoke hits the back of your throat as the bossa nova plays. All this beauty, all this ugliness. Brazil, my Brazilian Brazil.
13th
Here’s an interesting one, perhaps you’d want to give it a shot too. I try, to take of my socio-economic lens, yet with this one I find it nigh on impossible. Observe, you have a gate with an entrance. In fact there are three; one for humans, one for a car, and one for birds. What could it possibly mean? Is it a commentary on how separate we are from other species and machines? What would happen if you were to enter through the space meant for automobiles? It is the social norm to walk through the door meant for people. Walking through the automobile entrance is conceivable, but you can hardly imagine a human entering through the space dedicated to birds. Yet birds can walk through the automobile and human entrance. In fact, they can choose to entirely ignore the door, the fact that there exists even an entrance for them is an absurdity. It would have been more rational to put a space for a domesticated animal, one for a cat or dog, for instance. Is that the essence of this work? And yet, I took a photo of it. Would I have even noticed it, had it not been for the commemorative plaque? Try to imagine this entryway in the suburbs. You’d think the worst of the occupants. For one, why are they trying to be different? Do normal! Secondly, it can’t be economically efficient to have such frivolity. On my walk to elementary school there was a house, where on the roof the guy stored several stashes of newspaper, 24 packs of soda and at one point a TV. What do you make of such a thing and person.
You can find Gaudi’s door in Comillas Spain. It’s a seaside resort noted for being a vacation hotspot for the aristocracy. Here it is acceptable to have a doorway for a bird.
16th
My go to piece of music for contemplation, for feeling something, for looking at the world – preferably after a good exercise session and on a terrace with twenty two degrees and a bit of an overcast sky, in a spot with not too much noise but enough foot traffic so I can look at people – though I have tried it in other less than optimal situations and the experience is still good, is Keith Jarret’s The Koln Concert: Koln, January 24, 1975, Pt 1 – Live. I’m certain that it must have years ago come across my imaginative online searches for ‘good jazz’, but it took a scene from Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario as he navigates his vespa to make me appreciate it and eventually grow a strong emotional attachment to. When Milo was minus two months old, that is, a big bump, I put the speaker to the belly of my wife so he could listen to the entire piece. I listened to it again this morning, on a terrace with twenty two degrees and a bit of an overcast sky in a spot with…..….the only blemish was the absence of some physical excursion to calm the mind, unfortunately I am a little under the weather. Nevertheless, the magic happened.
I can’t lay claim to understanding the full piece and in fact it’s only the first eleven or so minutes that does it for me. And when I say understanding, I guess what I really mean is feel. There’s a beginning, middle and end, though if I was Jarrett I might have put the end at the beginning. The middle is right, for me.
It starts off with four gentle notes, repeated twice. Not too happy, and not too sad. That might be the definition of melancholy. It immediately puts me into a contemplative mood, and for the next minute and forty seconds I am allowed to look around, familiarize myself with my surroundings, my place in life, when I am hit some high and happy notes, but ever so briefly, then I am back into a calmness that allows for introspection. At two and half minutes I experience the first difficulties when something sounds off key and the rhythm gets a bit chunky. But that’s also brief, at three minutes things slow and I start to really feel the background chord as it becomes more pronounced. It features heavily throughout the first third of the piece, and the way I interpret it, is as time. It’s always there, in some instances you feel it more than others, but it is there, steady and going forward. Meanwhile, the right hand is busy living and with that the first feelings of joy, rejection, disappointment, confusion, abandonment and always intermittently there is the march of time. Suddenly, shortly after the five minute mark, the chord and melody strike in perfect sync, an unmistakably alignment of emotion and time. It is the experience of first love, a first reciprocated love that we have, yet it is also heard with a tinge of sadness, for we know that it is a love that can only be fated. Then time is back and the melody proceeds to explore, until at six and half minutes, the time turns into an audible ticking as it thumps loudly. Our first understanding that time is a tangible thing, perhaps that first heartbreak, that first encounter with a horrible disease, before retreating to a gentleness. And it is then that we start to live, we begin to live at seven minutes and twenty seconds as an immense harmony begins building, we are possible entering a prime and at seven minutes fifty we hear a loud audible moan from Keith Jarrett, and he keeps going, the moan then turns into a yell, the kind you would let out when you’re doing something hard but enjoying it, another howl as somehow it keeps going and gathering momentum until the top is reached, the foot on the piano pedal to extend a long vibration of the string. Tenderly, time returns, as the melody again becomes complex, drifts upwards, downwards, diagonally, and I think that at nine minutes and nineteen seconds, the exasperation in the voice of Keith Jarett is what hits me the most, it says to me that the world with all its beautiful moments is also irrational, terrifying, difficult, unrelenting. But there’s no time for that, at nine minutes forty five seconds we enter something new, we’ve looked life in the eyes, and we continue and something is being built, and not only that there’s a happiness to it. Another moan, of difficulty, we are struggling, but there’s something bold in that yell, because it says we are here and ready to face the challenge, in fact we are enjoying it, there’s a satisfaction in the music. At eleven minutes ten seconds, everything, everything comes together. The melody, the chords, the singing. Those are tears of joy.
And then I am lost – I like to think that I am not yet old or experienced enough to understand the middle of the piece, and I hold a belief that as the years go by and I listen to the piece I will be able to listen to and appreciate that part, and eventually far into the future the entire piece. For though I don’t understand the middle, there are some parts at the end where Keith Jarrett has injected some hope, it could possibly be the most beautiful and optimistic part of the session. Maybe that’s looking back at life, a rebirth, an appreciation of everything, the highs and the lows, something we only learn at the end. And so maybe he got the sequence correct. Time, that ever present repeating chord, somehow, will tell.
18 – 19th
Of all places, following the shores of Lake Ontario 35 kilometers west to Toronto, on a quiet residential street, there sits a copy of De Grote Nederlandse Kunstkalender 2023. Always towards Christmas time I have seen and been drawn to daily calendars that go on sale at the bookstores, though I’ve never owned one myself, aside from an advent calendar to count down the days of Christmas in December, with a chocolate behind the daily window. The kunstkalender is massive, weighing in at an estimated seven kilograms, and 365 pages of high quality paper, the width and length of say, at least two standard A4 pages. True to its name, it is massive. So rather impractical for the tiny flat that we occupy. But when my mom was here last year, I decided to gift it to her for Christmas, seeing as she had enough space in her luggage, and way more space in the suburban house which she lives in with my father in Canada. I liked the idea of her waking up every day and looking at the daily photo of an art installation from a Dutch artists and being reminded that her son and grandson are living there, and perhaps giving her a sense of the mood of the place. Was it a miscalculation on my part? First of all, my mom’s jaw dropped when she saw the pricetag after I failed to hide it adequately, and she promptly demanded we return it because no one in their right mind spends that much on a calendar, not least of which because they usually get one for free from the local grocery store. After persuading her to keep it, upon returning to Canada my father was perplexed at it’s vastness. Even a handyman like himself couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to hang this monster without the risk of destroying a wall. The free one they usually hang is paper thin and can hang on but a single thin nail in the kitchen. I suggested he build some kind of easel, though in the end I think they decided to leave it unhung and laid flat on a desk, which doesn’t make for good viewing and contemplation, in my opinion.
Now I wouldn’t call my parents philistine as they enjoy theater, shows and music. A lot of it from Europe, but also your typical North American indulgences. But I do imagine them looking at the art calendar with a bewilderment, on most days (if they’re even bothered to look at it anymore, I will find out when I visit in approximately three weeks), as I sometimes would with modern art installations. The artist, unlike here, is a rare creature in the suburbs. Here there is time, appreciation and public funds to create. That doesn’t exist over there, and for most even the consumption of this type of art is considered a waste of time, for dreamers, the unambitious, the lefties. Personally I’d also probably feel more comfortable reading about a developer who bought some land and made a fifty story tower and achieved a 20% return on investment instead of an artist who ‘sets up a fluid tie between the spectator and the recollection of a space’, as the July 10th 2023 entry of the calendar dictates. And I’ve lived here for more than a decade, so I can only imagine my parents face when they read that. I’m speaking about the consumption of that art, if you’re an artist actually doing that, well, no, as far as I know nobody does that over there. It’s all real estate, stocks, NFTs, RRSPs, cash back tax free accounts, dividend yields. This, this our world.
21st
Switch one letter and you get to polar opposites, and I experience it every day, usually more than once. I leave my back garden and go down the walkway amongst other peoples gardens, and at the end of that I take a right and right away I’m confronted with it. Bam! A Lotus car or some other similar make sitting in a custom made garage. The whole house reeks of it, new money I think, or newish money handed down from some benefactor. I promise you, the head of the household is some high up of a consumer good company, a useless one I should add. And the wife, well, there I can only speculate. She’s either taking care of the two kids full time taking the other car, that one is hard for me to pinpoint as they park it on the street, I’m guessing it’s the BMW SUV, to the Starbucks. Or more likely she’s also working in the consumer goods industry, employing two full time nannies to tend to the spoiled brats. Back to the garage, I shit you not, I can see through their fence that the guy has made a massive window display in the side of the garage so he can ogle the Lotus from the comfort of his living room. I wonder how that went down. The wife: “You sure? It’s a car. We have this eighty inch plasma to watch. You sure you need to be looking at it all the time?”. The man even has spotlights to make the shine that much more intense. When the kids go up to sleep, I can picture, though thankfully haven’t witnessed, the guy stroking his, let me say ego, on the couch while his precious Lotus is illuminated in the backyard.
Thankfully towards the end of the stree, some one hundred meters later, rationality returns and I approach the corner house. Everything about it exudes a sense of peace and tranquility. The garden is well kept, though I see it not planted to a degree that would require a full time commitment. The windows are large and numerous. Light and airy. In fact, this corner house overlooks the canal, and if the occupier was to look out of their window in the evening, they would find me sitting on the bench with a book. And they’d be familiar with this tranquility, because the other fascinating feature of this house is the oversized bookshelf. How I fantasize that one day I’m invited in to peruse the shelf and pick one out. Above the leather sofa, they have hung a painting. Oil, acrylic? I’m not one to say, but it is of good taste. A landscape piece, my guess is Tuscany or rural France. Lots of blue and lots of green, with a brown pathway cutting through a hill. Here I have seen the owner of the house on a few occasions. She’s an older late, late fifties I would guess. I would love to be her friend, to hear her wisdom, perhaps offer a break in her loneliness while talking about the painting.
Do you know, what I’m talking about?
25th
Today, a predicament, with a bit of time, some motivation, but no topic. A perfect moment to solicit the help of Mr. GPT. Originally I asked him to ask me some questions about the piece it suggested (actually the third piece – I had to specifically ask for a lesser known artist than the Van Gogh and Dali it originally offered), but in the end I ignored those and simply wrote a little about what first came to my mind.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you ‘”The Creation of the Birds” by Remedios Varo.
My first impressions. For reading, magical realism is a no for me, but with this piece of art, I have to say I like it – in a really shallow way, if I can be so critical of myself. Shallow because I simply like to look at it, without considering what this or that could mean and be interpreted as. A very North American approach you might say. I might as well be looking at Batman fighting Spiderman, it hits the same satisfaction lever in my brain. Is there something wrong with that? Wrong is too harsh, but it’s too easy, no? Too passive. You can’t just look at the painting and think the moon or star shining through the window is cool, and even more so because contained within the beam of light are instructions on how to draw and create birds. But not only that, as the owl man draws the bird, his pen is extended to pluck the string of a violin hung around his neck, presumably creating melodies, or maybe even the birdsong that will be assigned to the bird. I’m struggling to describe the paint dispenser. I’ll take a leap of faith and say the metal rod extends out into the night, and it is possibly a weather vane that dispenses the birds feather colors in accordance with the direction and intensity of the wind.
If you demand I go deeper then I’ll take the easy route and say it’s something about God, religion, determinism. But more than anything, let me just say that I like it. And maybe that’s the main point of magical realism, to enjoy it for what it is.